The Familiar Dark(4)

“Where is she?” I asked, head resting against the passenger window. Outside the daylight was fading fast, leaving a streak of orange sunset burning behind the clouds. Buildings blurred past as we drove down the pitted two-lane highway that served as the center of town: the general store with its uneven pyramid of toilet paper in the window, the whitewashed brick bank building turned a dirty gray over time, the sub shop where no one actually ate unless they wanted to flirt with food poisoning. How was I still here, in this forgotten, dead-end place that couldn’t even boast of nostalgic charm? No quaint town square, no sidewalks to stroll down on spring days, no vintage shops selling handmade treasures, only a random collection of dilapidated buildings spread along the edge of the highway and a tired, dirty sameness to everyone and everything. Why hadn’t I left and taken Junie with me? What had I been waiting for? Something rose up in my throat, vomit or tears, but I swallowed it down. Not now, I told myself. Later.

“She’s at the funeral home,” Cal said, eyes on the road, hands gripping the wheel with white knuckles. He paused, then gave it to me straight, the way he always had. “Waiting for the medical examiner. They both are.”

He’d already told me Izzy was dead, too, and I was working hard to wrap my mind around it. How two twelve-year-old girls could be alive and laughing this morning and not breathing a few hours later. It was a cliché that they’d had their whole lives ahead of them, but it had also been the truth. I didn’t understand how my daughter, whose presence lit up a room, whose life made mine bearable, could be dead. Shouldn’t the world have stopped spinning the moment she left it?

Cal pulled up right in front of the funeral home, in the space usually reserved for the hearse. The entrance was flanked with faux pillars in an attempt to give the place a distinguished air and distract from the fact it was a crappy cinder block building set on a cracked asphalt lot. Not the kind of place anyone would choose to say their final good-byes. Cal turned off the engine, the early evening suddenly bathed in quiet. When he turned to look at me, his face was pale and grim. “Can you do this?” he asked. “Because you don’t have to. Not right now.”

But I was already pushing out of the passenger side. “I can do it,” I said over my shoulder. Truth was, I didn’t know if I could. But moving forward felt like my only option. Sitting still would kill me, would give reality a chance to settle down beside me and sink its teeth in, all the way to the bone. I didn’t want to contemplate, even for a second, my life without Junie in it. How empty it would be from now on. How pointless.

There was another deputy waiting for us just inside the door, hat held in front of his beer-habit belly. John Miller, who I’d known my whole life, who’d let me sit in the back of his squad car to keep warm when the cops had showed up to search my mama’s trailer for meth. Once a year like clockwork and always drove away empty-handed. My mama may have been ignorant, but she was never, ever stupid. But today Deputy Miller acted like he’d never seen me before, said “Sure am sorry” in a low voice, and kept his gaze somewhere to the left of my shoulder. It didn’t bother me any, even though I could feel Cal stiffening up next to me. I didn’t want to look into Miller’s eyes, either, to see the pity and horror there. Wanted to keep pretending this was a particularly lucid nightmare I’d wake up and tell Junie about, snuggled with her on her narrow bed. I’d hug her too tight and she’d squirm away, telling me not to worry.

“Sheriff’s waiting for you on back in the bereavement room,” Miller said, clapped one hand on Cal’s shoulder as we walked past. I stumbled a little, small enough that no one else would have noticed, but Cal put out a hand, gripped me around the elbow. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “We’re all on the same team now.”

Sheriff Land and I would never be on the same team, not if we both lived for a thousand years. But I couldn’t tell Cal that, couldn’t ever look him in the eye and explain why. If he knew what I’d done, he’d never forgive me. And even worse, he’d never forgive himself. I nodded and followed him toward a closed door at the end of the hall. Cal hesitated with the knob in his hand, my last chance to back out, and then pushed the door open when I motioned him forward. He stood aside so I could go in first. The room was small, overheated, and crowded with too many bodies, even though there were only three already inside. Sheriff Land and Izzy’s parents, Jenny and Zach. I don’t know why their presence surprised me. Maybe the realization that we were going to be a matched, albeit uneven, set from now on. The parents of the dead girls. Forever lumped together. Pitiful cautionary tales.

“Come on in,” Sheriff Land said, oversized gray mustache quivering on his lip. His hair was slicked back, covering the beginning of a bald patch I knew had to be killing him. My stomach cramped and I looked away. “Take a seat.” And a beat too late, “Hate that you have to be here,” as if he was only now remembering why I was in the room. As if the fact that I had a murdered daughter, too, had somehow slipped his mind.

I slid into the empty seat next to Zach, who gave me a quick glance with wide, shocky eyes. His bland dad handsomeness had morphed into something terrible, and I wondered if I was just as altered. If I would no longer recognize myself next time I looked in the mirror. He had the same button-down shirt and khaki pants, straight teeth and premature gray at his temples, that I was used to seeing. But his face was haunted now, the ghost of his daughter’s absence etched across his features. On the other side of him, Jenny wept ceaselessly. All I could see was the top of her sleek, dark hair, her head tilted down and her sobbing muffled behind a clump of sodden Kleenex. From the soft way Sheriff Land looked at her, I could tell that Jenny, at least, had gotten the grieving-mother role exactly right. Not like me, who couldn’t seem to lay a hand on my own tears yet, but felt them bottled up and howling just behind my eyes.